Where Art and Medicine Mingle
Noreen Gomez, facilities program specialist at New Jersey Medical School, serves as the curator of NJMS Arts.
A 15-year-strong visual arts initiative in Newark blossoms in an unexpected location – a Rutgers medical school
Featured on news.rutgers.edu
With funding not even a possibility, Noreen Gomez, the facilities program specialist at New Jersey Medical School, has taught her colleagues how to make a bleak-looking and sterile maze of classrooms and lecture halls come alive with creative expression. Simple: Invite anyone who desires to show off their artistic talents to fill the walls.
The results have spoken volumes about how many talented artists are camouflaged as students, health care providers, academicians and business and professional staffers. Even a few art careers have been launched.
Gomez is the “curator” for the New Jersey Medical School community, despite personally claiming to have “no art talent at all.” For the past decade, she has nurtured what has become one of Newark’s most thriving arts initiatives: New Jersey Medical School Arts, a yearlong exhibition series showcasing hundreds of amateur and professional artworks created by the community at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences as well as members of the Greater Newark community it serves.
NJMS Arts now consists of three four-month shows filling the calendar year, featuring creations ranging from paintings and photography to sculpture, jewelry and textiles throughout the medical school’s walls and common areas.
It’s come a long way from a nearly obscure start. NJMS Arts began in 1999, with a one-week Spring Art Festival launched by Ernesto A. Amaranto, a psychiatrist at University Behavioral Health Care, to showcase the talent on the Newark campus, then eventually expanded into a six-week Fall Arts Festival.
“The school looked bleak when the art came down and the walls were empty,” Gomez explains. “Many of the artists were interested in having their work up for longer periods of time, so I started inquiring if certain people would donate pieces to fill a whole wall at a time.”
Shortly after the program moved to the fall in 2007, Gomez was named facilities director and began transitioning the program to a year-round event. NJMS Arts soon blossomed into its current three-show structure: the National Arts Program (January-April), which is part of a national initiative to showcase employee and community art in the workplace; the Collaborative Art Exhibition (May-August), which displays works from four arts organizations serving the disabled community; and the Fall Arts Festival (September-December), which features the Rutgers community, their families and the public.
Click here to read the full article.